{"id":1111,"date":"2009-06-05T03:08:50","date_gmt":"2009-06-05T03:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jurnsearch.wordpress.com\/?p=1111"},"modified":"2009-06-05T03:08:50","modified_gmt":"2009-06-05T03:08:50","slug":"mind-your-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2009\/06\/05\/mind-your-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Mind your language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.britac.ac.uk\/reports\/language-matters\/position-paper.cfm\">June 2009 position paper<\/a> from the British Academy, arising from a one year study to&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;investigate the hypothesis that UK humanities and social science research was becoming increasingly insular in outlook (and even in aims)&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&#8230; due to the way in which, it is claimed, a&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;lack of [ <em>second<\/em> ] language skills inflicts a real handicap on scholars&#8221;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Inward-looking UK funding models may also be a strong factor, although this is not mentioned. And the incredible barriers raised by European universities against British academic job-seekers.<\/p>\n<p>Equally worryingly, the report talks of&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;An over-reliance on imported talent&#8221; &#8230; [ <em>humanities and social science<\/em> ] &#8220;university departments are increasingly addressing this skills shortage by buying-in the skills they need from abroad, rather than by seeking to help UK researchers and academics to &#8216;upskill&#8217;.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That sounds very familiar. A very accurate observation, I&#8217;d say.<\/p>\n<p>In the absence of such UK language skills, perhaps we need a Google Translate specialist &#8216;Humanities Scholar version&#8217;. Along with serious up-skilling on search in other languages. In China you can&#8217;t become even a junior academic, unless you pass a rigorous state test on how to use Google &#8216;to the max&#8217;. The test includes&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;how to use Google for automatic translation from Chinese to English or the other way round&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A new June 2009 position paper from the British Academy, arising from a one year study to&#8230; &#8220;investigate the hypothesis &hellip;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2009\/06\/05\/mind-your-language\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-search","category-official-and-think-tank-reports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}